On the road with Patricia Williams and Bill Ayers

In this weeks program we speak with legal scholar and critical race theorist Patricia Williams and education scholar and activist Bill Ayers. We caught up with both of them in Chicago in November 2011, at the National Association for Multicultural Education's annual conference, for which they were both keynote speakers.

Patricia Williams is a legal scholar and was a pioneer in critical race theory.
Critical Race Theory developed in the 1980 s as a result of the desire of many black legal scholars in the U.S. to develop a critique of liberal civil rights discourse, which embodied ideals of assimilation and integration. Critical Race Theory analyzes the way that white supremacy and racial power is reproduced over time and the role that law plays in this process. Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and writes a column for The Nation magazine called Diary of a Mad Law Professor. In this program, she shares her perspective on race and inequity in the U.S. education system.

Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor of Education and Senior University Scholar in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where his work has focused on teaching for social justice and issues in urban education. His involvement in education reaches back decades, and includes primary school teaching and work in early innovative urban education reform efforts. Bill is well-known for his leadership in militant resistance groups during the Vietnam War, within Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen and Weather Underground. We spoke with Bill about resistance and hope in the movement to transform our society and our schools.

Music by Lupe Fiasco - Words I Never Said

You can download mp3s of this program via the following links:
Program #11 On the road with Patricia Williams and Bill Ayers on Internet Archive
Program #11 On the road with Patricia Williams and Bill Ayers on Audioport (podcast)

Learn more about National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME)

Patricia Williams
http://madlawprofessor.wordpress.com/

Educations Radio's Deborah Polin with Bill Ayers at the NAME conference
http://billayers.org/

Educations Radio's Tim Scott getting fresh with Bill Ayers at the NAME conference